Abstract
This article examines the problem of motherhood in the poetry of Joanna Mueller from
the perspective of feminist body studies. Throughout her poetic work Mueller keeps analyzing
the formation of a new subject, a process closely connected with the creation, or giving birth,
to new poems and reproduction. She dignifi es the experience of motherhood by focusing on the
peculiar condition of ‘being two in one’. This is further enhanced by the emblematic arrangement
of the individual poems (formed into mounds, folds, the womb, the vagina, and blood vessels)
and references to the primeval Mother Goddess. The matrifocal narration exalts the maternal
female body to its sovereign position, justifi ed by its power over life; indeed, the combined force
of Mueller’s naturalistic description and discursive momentum not only subverts the patriarchal
narrative of female passivity and inferiority but in a way sacralizes the feminine principle.
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